If you’re not yet leveraging a product-centric strategy to drive customer acquisition, innovation, and growth on the AppExchange, our latest Journey Through the AppExchange webinar is the one for you! The marketplace is in the midst of a major shift towards product-led growth and in this session, CodeScience Chief Revenue Officer, Sean Hogan, spoke with Dave Vacanti, Founder of MagicRobot, a Salesforce-native data attribution intelligence solution.
MagicRobot is a proud Salesforce ISV partner that helps Salesforce customers connect their marketing data to their sales opportunity data and understand how marketing activities help reps find and win business. Thanks to their strategy of going all-in on the Salesforce platform and maintaining a laser focus on the product, MagicRobot has grown from a bootstrapped startup to an enterprise-ready partner with several marquee clients.
The webinar kicked off with Sean and Dave diving into how the team at MagicRobot found white space within Salesforce and filled a critical void in the crowded martech landscape. Watch the webinar here and read up on a few of the highlights from their chat below.
Leveraging the Salesforce Platform
Years ago, Dave attended conferences like Dreamforce and thought a Salesforce partnership would be the dream entrepreneurial scenario. As he stated, “You basically have everything you could possibly need baked in to start your own business.” He was looking for the right opportunity to join the ecosystem when he gave a session on how to set up Salesforce and Eloqua in order to measure results in Salesforce. He was surprised to find out that marketing attribution was a major gap for most partners. Those he spoke to were eager to know more about improving their tracking processes.
There are a variety of ways that marketers promote their company’s products and services across complex marketing technology stacks, including multiple channels and content types. It’s typically difficult to pinpoint where ROI is coming from with all of those tactics in play. Dave said, “I thought there’s problems like that within Salesforce because they haven’t built it out yet. They have, obviously, the AppExchange, and ISV partners are a huge part of the strategy. So it seemed to me there would be all these opportunities to help companies do something really bespoke – but not so bespoke that you need a craftsperson to come in and reinvent that wheel.”
This graphic showcases just how many different pieces of technology and techniques are out there for marketers to use. Correlating that back to sales results within Salesforce was the problem MagicRobot set out to solve.
Finding Product-Market Fit
MagicRobot started small but has quickly expanded to having over 35 clients, including several household names in the tech world. Dave explained, “Each of these clients really represent a marketing leader that ran into the same problem I did and said, ‘Well, somebody’s got to have done something about this. What’s on the AppExchange? What’s out there?’ And so, they came to the AppExchange and we started a dialogue.”
These conversations provided MagicRobot the opportunity to get crucial early customer feedback and mold their product based on the needs of the market. Not only that, they were able to maintain a laser focus on their customers while continuing to iterate until they were ready for the big leagues. According to Dave, “that partnership is really what has enabled us from $0 to now where we’ve brought on a new CEO and a COO and we’re going after initial investment and true commercialization for operations and sales and marketing.”
Pressure-Testing the Product
Ensuring your product is as reliable as possible is essential at the beginning of a partner’s journey. Sean and Dave both emphasized how important it is to put your product through pressure tests and see what you can break. As Dave explained, “there’s only so much QA even a small team can do on a small data set.” He suggested using a very targeted set, such as a specific client asking for a certain functionality. Then, your team can work together to figure out how to make it functionally productizable and useful for a variety of companies. This process will prepare you for the roll-out with your client.
Another key takeaway that Sean and Dave discussed was the ability to scale your product as you expand. Dave was adamant that a product should be “scalable, extensible, and all the code be reusable, so that it basically never breaks… The more important thing is that it be engineered so that if we’re going to build an extension, a new capability can be a new tendril and be reusable.” Sean agreed that being able to scale properly is just as important as innovating and iterating with clients in order to keep growing in the marketplace.
To hear more from Sean and Dave and get a copy of the deck, register and watch the webinar here.
Companies build their Salesforce businesses better with CodeScience. It is our mission that no ISV navigates Salesforce alone. If you’re looking for guidance on your product, help supporting your customers, or just need to ask an expert, get in touch today!
